Over the past few months I’ve written very little. I’ve been making a lot of time for myself, working on some other projects which I intend to write about here and, most critically, somewhat stepping away from so many things which are a source of stress in my life.
Be it stupidity online, situations in my personal life, or just the sorry state of things right now given the pandemic, racial tensions, and everything else you can think of I’ve just really had to step away.
I think it’s done well for me. It’s certainly an aspect of “self care,” as trendy as that concept is these days, but it’s done on my terms. I’ve cut out people, places, things, anything I find undesirable in my life that I can reasonably let go of. It’s sometimes a challenge but where I have made progress it has been incredibly rewarding.
That leads back to this site, and the stuff I’ve been doing here for the past decade plus. I’ve gone from this site being a hobby to me trying to make it my “main” thing and, by virtue of trying to follow the trends, I began trying to make Xadara into something more than it was supposed to be. I tried to play the social media popularity game and eventually let that take over what I wrote, how I wrote, and why I wrote. While it was still things I wanted to cover I was doing it all with social media trends, SEO, and all the other modern web bullshit in mind. Me just having fun with everything took a back seat.
Not anymore. I’ve found the blogs and such I like most are the most eclectic, following their own flow with things and being what they are for the sake of the content – not to appease Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, what the fuck ever.
Such was my goal when I originally started this site, and this held true early on in my writing, but that changed over the past 5 years or so. Well, now it’s changing back, and come August I’m going to do my best to not only get back to regular writing but to have fun with it and do it for the sake of it. All the SEO and Social Media trickery on Earth won’t change the fact that the algorithms are generally against someone like me, and unless I sacrifice all my time and energy on making a website that looks like a corporate fluff piece, ruining my content and my creativity in the process, all for views, what’s the point? If I’m going to get some 50 views a day anyway, I might as well have fun with it, cut down on the overhead and time it takes just to get an article out and hopefully take that earned time to create more content.
I guess the short form of this entry is over the past 5 years I let myself get too caught up in typical internet bullshit to realize what it was doing to my urge to create and my produced content. It’s time for change, and time for me to move forward with this crazy little project that is Xadara.
More to come, as always.